One major common problem faced by cellular and landline service providers is market competition. In today's climate of competitive markets, cellular service providers have found that one way for them to grow market share and defend their businesses is to be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with landline service providers. In addition, cellular service providers seek to differentiate their service offerings, and to capture the largest portion of market revenue by meeting an ever increasing demand for access to a wide range of media forms such as MP3 encoded audio, still and video imaging, data, instant messaging, and email. In a similar manner, the landline service providers have found that to grow market share and ward off competition, they too must be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with cellular service providers. Support for broad economical access to these converging forms of communication is needed to enable unfettered market growth, and to support the development and use of new handheld devices needed to provide increasing levels of mobile multimedia communication functionality.
Although the formation of alliances and partnerships between cellular service providers and landline service providers may help to ward off competition, such alliances and partnerships are faced with other problems. For example, the erection of cellular infrastructure such as cellular towers may be an expensive venture since this may require acquisition of real estate, whether in the form of outright purchases or through leasing. Cellular infrastructure also requires the establishment of one or more expensive backbone links to handle core network traffic. Another cellular-related problem is that the cellular signals do not penetrate and propagate in buildings such as homes and offices very well. This is especially true with the frequencies that are typically utilized in the United States, which may vary between 800 MHz and 1900 MHz or 1.9 GHz.
A rapidly growing number of consumers and professionals engage in electronic forms of communication such as email, instant messaging, and voice communication. Items of information that may be of longer term importance to the participants may be exchanged during a voice call or within text messaging, for example. A party may include a spreadsheet, a video clip and/or still image, an email address, or a universal resource locator, for example, as part of the exchange. At the present time, it is up to the participants in an exchange to keep notes or records of the subject matter of their communications, and the information that was exchanged that may be of later importance. At some later point in time, one of the participants of an earlier exchange may contact another of the participants. In the case of a voice or video call, for example, the person initiating contact knows the reason for making contact, and may have already gathered the materials they wish to discuss. The person being contacted, however, can only guess the reason for the contact before actually answering the call, even when they have conventional caller ID service. Some email applications may permit the searching of email subject lines and body text for strings of interest. Upon receiving a voice call, a user may use this capability to access all email containing a particular text string related to the subject of the call. In spite of this type of tool, when parties to a call revisit a particular subject, call participants may struggle to recall and/or produce a document and/or attachment that was exchanged during a prior call, hampering the discussion.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.